This is a new page for keeping track of efforts to define and implement standard interfaces for integrated library systems that support discovery applications.

ILS Interoperability discussion group

In 2010, a group convened at the Code4lib conference to discuss and coordinate implementations of interfaces between discovery applications and integrated library systems, building on the previous work of the Digital Library Federation group described below, and on various implementation projects such as Jangle, Umlaut, and XC. The group is being coordinated by Roy Tennant. Interested folks are welcome to participate; see the main web page for the group.

Digital Library Federation ILS-DI

In 2007 and 2008, I chaired a DLF task group to recommend standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System with new applications supporting user discovery.

Our official recommendation, an associated XML schema, and some of the work products that led up to the recommendation, can be found here.

I made a presentation on the recommendation in a June 10 NISO webinar. Freely accessible slides and speaker’s script for that presentation can be found here.

Related projects

Jangle is a related, developer-driven effort to expose library resources via the Atom Publishing Protocol. It implements some functions that are similar to those that ILS-DI recommends, and there have been some experiments implementing ILS-DI functions over Jangle.

OLE is a Mellon-funded project that aims to re-architect the ILS as components in an enterprise-scale, service-oriented archiecture. Some of the services it envisions could be implemented by ILS-DI interfaces.